Consumers in urban areas spend an appreciable amount of time commuting between home, school, place of employment, and various other locations for social engagements. Many choose to listen to broadcast radio, particularly AM and FM radio, both to pass the time with music and commentary from a disc-jockey, and to keep informed as to weather forecasts, news, and the like. Some models of mobile stations (MSs) currently include an FM radio receiver integrated with their mobile telephony circuitry so that users of the MS in generally need not carry multiple devices for mobile telephone service and FM radio reception.
Densely populated urban areas often include tunnels, underground trains (subways), and the like that causes reception on a commuter's broadcast radio receiver to be interrupted or at least severely degraded for appreciable periods of time. Consumers often switch their radio receiver off when the signal quality becomes too degraded to avoid hearing excessive static, and await turning it back on again until after they emerge from the tunnel or subway. When the commuter is driving through a tunnel, this translates into several distractions from driving duties during the critical times of entering and leaving the tunnel. When the commuter is riding a subway, this translates into a potentially large block of idle time that the consumer was neither informed with updates of news and weather, nor entertained with music and disc jockey commentary.
What is needed in the art is a way to get current information to persons while they are in locations that are unavailing to broadcast radio signals such as AM, FM and recently popularized digital (satellite) radio. Digital radio operates in the U.S. at approximately 2.3 GHz, and appears even more susceptible to signal interruption by physical obstacles. Despite using ground-based repeaters to overcome adverse effects of buildings and bridges, digital radio is subject to similar subway and tunnel limitations as noted above.